Have you been able to run a simple perl script (blah.pl) from /var/www/cgi-bin ? I realize you say you have using mod_cgi, but I got this following script running with just the vanilla install of mod_perl... am I missing something from your description?

Have you been able to run a simple perl script (blah.pl) from /var/www/cgi-bin ?

Haven't tried that; I created my own modperl directory, assuming that anything in the cgi-bin would automatically be processed by mod_cgi with no choice. When I use my own modperl directory, it displays as plain text, despite making the .pl file executable, etc.

Did you also add .pl to the 'AddHandler cgi-script' section in your httpd.conf? Curious how this could work. I've tried 'AddHandler perl-script .pl' in addition to the directory 'SetHandler perl-script', but nothing.

since doing that I installed Mason, which promptly broke the script that was executing above... lol. I can take a look when I get home (server at home) to see if that was, in fact, added to httpd.conf.